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This paper argues that the integrated framework of peace education - understood as education for peace, human rights, mutual understanding and democracy - is a necessary building block for quality education for all, for building learning societies in the sense of life-long and life-wide learning. But peace education needs the orientation towards a culture of peace to get a sense of direction: How can it contribute to peace building efforts at large? How can relevance and effectiveness of programs be assessed against the broader picture of 'Peace Writ Large' (Anderson & Olson, 2003:14)?
The combined efforts of both the state/government -"track one," including police and security forces - and civil society and other "track two" actors, including education professionals, development organisations and enterprises - are needed to build local capacities for peace. Unlearning both violent behaviour and mindsets as well as developing constructive alternatives for handling "difference" in a systematic way are at the heart of the matter. Fostering "Communities of Practice" (Wenger) among practitioners of peace education and leaders of conflict-affected communities is the direction for future action.
These options for future action will be examined from four directions:
a) countries who meet human security requirements
b) countries with peace building capacity
c) crises prevention and peace processes - linking different levels of peace programming
d) quality learning in regions of conflict - quality control of peace education
Culture of Peace - Learning to live together
The mid-nineties were a moment of reappraisal of concepts such as peace education and the culture of peace, such as peace building and "learning to live together," a term phrased by the report of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century to UNESCO "'Delors-Report"). Those notions were based on the rejection and prevention of violence and the development of a culture of conflict resolution (1), anchored in an implicit theory of social change.
Education was emphasised as "the heart of any strategy for peace-building" while it was easily recognised that this educational focus still played a very marginal role in the educational process and systems. „While education, in its broadest sense, is the leading modality for action, to be successful, it must be associated with social justice and sustainable human development" (2). Concerning the time horizon, these were "grand proposals" of decade thinking (5-10 years) and generational vision (20+ years), according to John Paul Lederach (1997, quoted by Schell-Faucon 2000).
The notion of 'Culture of Peace' was deliberately chosen by UNESCO and the UN for rooting and popularising a positive notion of peace, put it up as a signpost, pointing towards the task ahead: transforming not only the institutional structures and manifestations of war, but also its deep cultural roots, the culture of violence and war, into a culture of peace, as a positive, dynamic, participatory process. The underlying conceptual assumption is that peace is built and sustained by social attitudes and skills.
Social learning and action research were flagged as the chosen paradigm, stating that "a culture of peace consists of the set of values, attitudes and behaviours that reflect and inspire social interaction and sharing, based on the principles of freedom, justice and democracy, tolerance and solidarity; that reject violence and endeavour to prevent conflicts by tackling their roots; that solve problems through dialogue and negotiation; and that guarantee to everyone the full exercise of all rights and the means to participate fully in the endogenous development of their society" (3).
The practical focus was and still is on classical educational tools such as textbooks, history books, civic education, the asp-school network, a world linguistic atlas etc.. UNESCO created University chairs in human rights, democracy and peace, civic education and convenes annual meetings of directors of human rights institutes. However, the notion of contributing to a culture of peace is also extended to those serving the military, following an Central American Defence Ministers' meeting and a speech on Human Rights Training and Education in 1997 in Miami by UNESCO's DG, together with the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights.
Typical program elements were and still are Emergency Educational Reconstruction (PEER) in countries like Somalia, and Guatemala (indigenous education), community peace education in places like the Philippines (1996, rewarding the peace treaty with the Moro National Liberation Front), Sri Lanka (northern part of the country) Tbilisi and the Central Asian Centre for Conflict Prevention in the Kyrgyz Republic.
While the role of non-governmental institutions and individuals is recognised for promoting a culture of peace, UN leadership is claimed for mobilising and committing government - "for education is not enough" (op Cit). Governments need to participate actively and an important role must be played by the multinational economic institutions.
However, little conceptual effort was made to clarify the architecture and dynamics of such a multi-track approach. While it is rightly acknowledged that economies of violence, protracted social conflict and deeply embedded violence in societies in disarray cannot be transformed by educational strategies alone, the concept of 'Culture of Peace' as presented by UNESCO and UNICEF is falling short to give guidance HOW programs and strategies on the micro - meso - and macro level need to be and could be connected in perspective and practice to achieve the intended goals.
A: Human Security - one avenue for enhancing Peace Building Capacity ?
The notion of "human security" offers a first direction for grounding the quest for essentials of pace education. This notion coined in 1994 by the United Nations Development Program in its Human Development Report. Following UNDP and OECD; 'human security' is understood in seven dimensions, beginning with freedom from poverty, food security, access to health services, ecological security, personal integrity and protection from violence, torture, war, through the right to cultural autonomy and identity of language, ethnicity, age, religion or nationality and, lastly, political security, implying the respect of human rights and civic rights, and freedom from oppression.
The notion of Human Security was strongly embraced by the governments of Canada and Norway, who together took the leadership in creating a Human Security Network, a network of 13 countries by now, including Austria, Chile, Greece, Ireland, Jordan, Mali, the Netherlands, Slovenia, South Africa and Thailand. All network members have pledged to protect human and civic rights, to stick to democratic governance, to strive for a culture of peace and peaceful resolution of conflict, pursue a just, sustainable and peaceful world order and overcome poverty.
From a development perspective, this approach offers the additional advantage of emphasising the life of poor people: "A human security approach identifies and addresses the sources of risk affecting poor women and men. It breaks out of the increasingly artificial separation between conflict prevention and resolution, post-conflict reconstruction, natural disaster preparedness and relief, and work on rights-based governance. An increasingly important approach to anti-poverty action concentrated on reducing the multiple sources of risk [...] and assisting poor people to contend with them." (4)
As peace education requires favourable political conditions and a longer term view (5), one possible approach for peace education action in development would be exploring the potential of this Human Security Network as a clearinghouse for peace education and good practice in peace building, in the first place among the 13 countries themselves, but possibly also regarding their role in regional co-operation with neighbouring countries.
Among other things, this requires a mapping of the current state of their educational systems and the professional quality available. As youth in school equals the number of youth outside schooling systems, it seems vital to choose networking modes who have a connecting potential, who bring youth-in-school and out-of-school together, who facilitate co-learning between teachers and educational professionals from non-formal learning settings.
The notion of a "Community of Practice" (6) lends itself to be applied here as a guiding principle for building a learning community of peace educators: The community is informally bound through exposure to a common class of problems and a common pursuit of solutions, the educators share similar goals and interests, they are peers, executing "real work," committed to jointly developing better practice. "The concept of practice (7) connoted doing, but not just doing in and of itself. It is doing in a historical and social context that gives structure and meaning to what we do [...] such a concept of practice includes both the explicit and the tacit, it includes what is said and what is left unsaid; what is represented and what is assumed."
B. Poverty and Peace building
A second direction for future action asks the more difficult question whether urgency and scale of situations of violence and poverty need to be the priority for peace education efforts or whether the focus should rather conditions which are mildly favourable and offer some grounded expectations for tangible results.
Among the 51 countries involved in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Process in 2003, only half (26 countries) fulfilled the minimum requirements for human security, according to the classification of the peace and conflict survey by Monty G. Marshall and Ted Robert Gurr (VENRO 2003:9). Out of those 26, only a handful of them are expected to dispose of clearly positive peace-buiding capacity, being Benin, Bolivia, Guyana, Honduras, Mali, Macedonia, Moldova and Nicaragua. Marshall/Gurr use six indicators to come to this ranking, being human security, self-determination, discrimination, regime type, durability, societal capacity and neighbourhood.
As can be seen from the Education-For-All Monitoring Report 2004, understandably the same set of countries also shows severe shortages in providing basic education for the majority of their populations.
It is not my intention to draw a gloomy picture here. On the contrary, these "conditiae humanae" call for comprehensive action and long-term commitment. It is quite clear that one cannot expect positive results from relatively limited elements of peace education programs it the overall picture of peace building capacity and availability of education professionals is not taken into account.
As stated above and below, this is a call to go for a strategy of community of practise and a carefully designed multi-track approach, respecting the effectiveness criteria for peace (education) work.
C: Crisis Prevention and Peace Processes - linking different levels of peace programming
The third direction for future action in peace education can build on positive policy choices which have been made in recent years: The German Ministry of Development Co-operation has committed itself to long-term programming in the field of crisis prevention and accompaniment of peace processes with four so-called partner-countries. For the time being, Colombia, Guatemala, Sri Lanka and Senegal have been chosen. The latter two have also drafted a Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRSP by the World Bank) (VENRO 2003:9).
This choice clearly reflects the state-of-analysis concerning war and intervention at the beginning of the XXieth Century (8) . The context calls for deliberate third-party ("outsider") co-operation in peace education, addressing early prevention, late prevention and continuous prevention (curbing the re-escalation of violence). Special attention should be paid to the situation of male poor youth and their future horizon, their risk of loosing identity and recompense this by easy access to small arms.
The commitment to long-term programming and accompaniment opens very promising avenues to help create peace education strategies who contribute consciously to progress on the bigger picture of the peace process.
The following four criteria identified by the "Reflection on Peace Practice Project" (9) are very helpful and relevant in order to define appropriate and useful benchmarks below the "grand goals" of ending violent conflict and building sustainable just structures. A Peace (education) Program by any local and/or international agency is effective and contributes to "Peace Writ Large" if (10)
1. The effort causes participants and communities to develop their own initiatives for peace
2. The effort results in the creation or reform of political institution to handle grievances that fuel the conflict
3. the efforts prompts people increasingly to resist violence and provocation to violence and
4. the effort results in an increase in people's security.
As the authors point out, „these four effectiveness criteria are additive. If a single peace practice effort meets all four criteria, it is more effective that one that accomplishes only one of the values changes. However, to assess the significance of a particular change in a given context, three additional, interconnected elements must be considered who are the impacts that communities care about:
- urgency of change: change is more significant if it is sooner rather than later. Peace practice cannot be patient with continued suffering. Programs that promote changes that can only be realised in decades hence may do some good, but too many people suffer in the interim
- sustained change: change is more significant if it is sustained over time rather than fleeting or one-off. Things might improve for a short period but then get worse in the long run. This clearly needs to be balanced with the notion of urgency above
- proportionality of change: change is more significant if it is proportional to, and on the same scale as, the violence or destructive conflict. If the violence is occurring at a national scale, efforts to address is at a very local scale will be valuable, but not as significant as those efforts that affect the national scale." (11)
Peace education cannot be not directly responsible to bring about Peace-Writ-Large; but any agency, considering to start peace education programs needs to monitoring whether there is progress in the larger picture, and whether peace education or other elements of peace programs are at the order of the day. Thus, any peace education approach need to answer the question whether it makes a tangible contribution to that larger peace process.
D. Quality learning in regions of conflict - quality control of peace education
Following extensive international consultation, the UN Peace University is initiating a Master's Degree in Peace Education in 2004 (12). The degree program wants to enable capable individuals to mobilise educational frameworks for building local capacities for peace. The would-be students are seen as agents of change in their respective countries and context.
While the "Culture of Peace" concept saw education as leading modality in 1997, the lessons learned around the globe since, perceive educational reform - structures and content - as a prerequisite and parallel action. The reflection of practice and role of peace education in countries and regions that are experiencing conflict and development challenge has led to more clarity in this respect. Gender-based initiatives to reduce violence in society and promote practice of peace are considered essential.
This Master program has a clear-cut emphasis on internal violent conflict (including the issue of human rights norms and humanitarian law) and the increasing role of non-state actors, environmental constraints and conflicts, as e.g. the management of fresh water.
The modules "psychology of violence and peace" tackle inter-group relations theory such as the social identity theory, to explain the interaction between intra-personal determinants of aggression and violence with social and cultural factors such as genocide, ethno-national conflicts, urban youth violence and other forms of intrastate violence; and interpersonal conflicts such as domestic violence and school violence.
To combine the WHAT and the HOW of peace education is seen as prerequisite, while maintaining the core essential that humans can change their acquired violent behaviours and beliefs. The HOW focuses on creative and participatory teaching-learning strategies, principles of non-violent action and conflict intervention in personal, professional and social settings. Here the common ground with educational reform is evident. It is important to notice, however, that there were clearly two families of thought in the international expert consultations leading to this U-PEACE curriculum. The two groupings of educational professionals could roughly be characterised as "Freireians" and "Gandhians." They express diverse appreciation of the importance of critical and creative thinking, the importance of subtle and flexible pedagogy, and especially the role of subversion versus harmony.
It is interesting to notice a renewed focus on disarmament education as part of the curriculum, particularly in relation to small arms (13), taking up the disarmament debate of twenty years ago under today's conditions of states in disarray, the erosion of a state monopoly on violence and the privatisation of the weapons markets.
And last but not least, attention is being paid to the analysis of language contributing to the escalation or de-escalation of conflict .
As a result, exploring creative ways of handling "difference" in groups, societies and people can be clearly inscribed as a central assumption in Peace Education. It should be recalled that the International Conference of Education Ministers of the World came to very much the same conclusions after having examined contents and learning strategies for an "Education for all for learning to live together" (14): While both formal and non-formal education are essential tools for launching and promoting sustainable processes of constructing peace, democracy and human rights, they cannot alone provide solutions to the complexity, the tensions and even the contradictions of the present world. Learning to live together comprises the challenging discovery that other human beings are talking, feeling, thinking and acting 'differently', not because they are living in different cultures but because the have exactly the same needs for wellbeing, justice and beauty. In this perspective, learning to live together implies the right of others to stay different.
In conclusion, tolerance cannot be prescribed from above, the overcoming of prejudices and foe-images cannot be ‚recommended'. Dealing with difference can be built over time through a real person-to-person encounter between ‚enemies' resp. people of different cultures, through a combination of research-action-reflection and practice, not to find out similarities in the first place, but in order to acknowledge "cultural" differences and negative attitudes, in order to open communication channels about the significance of those attitudes (e.g. regarding fears - possible reasons - possible consequences). Over time, this will construct a mirror image of how one's own culture is perceived (taking-the-perspective-of-the-other learning) and will ideally lead to some type of functional co-operation. In case of heavy asymmetries, balance can be improved through the support of a third party.
Otherwise, introducing peace education in development cooperation might be guided by good intentions, but producing weak results instead of best intentions and strong results!
Literature
Alex Austin, Martina Fischer and Oliver Wils (eds.), Peace and Conflict Impact Assessment. Critical Views on Theory and Practice. Berghof Handbook Dialogue Series, Berlin 2003
Mary B. Anderson and Lara Olson with assistance from Kristin Doughty, Confronting War: Critical Lessons for Peace Practitioners. Reflection on Peace Practice Project. The Collaborative for Development Action, Inc., Cambridge, USA 2003
Education for Peace, Human Rights and Democracy in the UNESCO context. Source Book of Documents and Material, Eds. European University Center for Peace Studies (EPU), German Commission for UNESCO, Austrian Commission for UNESCO, Stadtschlaining 1998
Mir A. Ferdowsi/Volker Matthies (Eds.), Den Frieden gewinnen. Zur Konsolidierung von Friedensprozessen in Nachkriegsgesellschaften. Bonn 2003 (Dietz)
Mader, Gerald, Eberwein, Wolf-Dieter, Vogt Wolfgang R. (eds.) , Merkel, Christine M. (concept & co-ordination), Friedenspolitik der Zivilgesellschaft. Zugänge - Erfolge - Ziele. Münster 1998 (agenda)
Merkel, Christine M., Praxis und Strategien gesellschaftlicher Friedensarbeit. Akteure, Handlungsräume, Perspektiven. In: Mader, Gerald et al, 1998, S.22-42
OECD, DAC Guidelines on Poverty Reduction, Paris 2001 (auch http://www.oecd.org/dac/htm/g-pov.htm)
SangSaeng-Special Issue: Multi-faceted education toward a culture of peace. No 7, Summer 2003 (Magazine of the Asia-Pacific Centre of Education for International Understanding) (http://www.unescoapceiu.org)
Schell-Faucon, Stefanie, Conflict Transformation through Educational and Youth Programs.
The Berghof Handbook for Conflict Transformation, July 2000, p. 2-15 (http://www.berghof-center.org/handbook/schell/)
Stiftung Entwicklung und Frieden, Globale Trends. Fakten, Analysen, Prognosen 2004/2005. Eds. Ingomar Hauchler, Dirk Messner, Franz Nuscheler, Frankfurt 2003 (Fischer)
Towards a culture of Peace. Report of the Director-General of UNESCO on educational activities.... UNESCO 29C/INF.17, Annex II (1997) and UN General Assembly A/52/292
UN Peace University, Master's Degree in Peace Education, 2004/2005, http://www.upeace.org/academic/masters/Peace_Education.htm (retrieved 29.01.2004)
VENRO-Projekt „Perspektive 2015" - Armutsbekämpfung und Krisenprävention. Wie läßt sich Armutsbekämpfung konfliktsensitiv gestalten ? Bonn 2003
Wenger, Etienne, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity, Cambrigde University Press 1997
Wulf, Christoph, Merkel Christine (Eds.), Globalisierung als Herausforderung der Erziehung. Theorien, Grundlagen, Fallstudien. Münster/New York/München/Berlin 2002 (Waxmann)
(1) UNESCO Mid-Term Strategy 1996-2001, Doc 28/C 4, Foreword of the Director-General, Federico Mayor, Paris 1996
(2) UNESCO 29C/INF.17, Annex II, Towards a Culture of Peace
(3) UNESCO 29 C/INF. 17
(4) OECD 2001:37 quoted from VENRO policy paper Armutsbekämpfung und Krisenprävention 2003:9
(5) Essentials of Peace Education, Gugel/Jäger 2003. http://www.peace-education-net/topics retrieved 20.1.20045
(6) the elements of a ‚Community of Practice' are quoted from Community Intelligence Labs, 2001, retrieved from http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/definitions.shtml on Feb 4, 2004
(7) Etienne Wenger 1997
(8) compare for instance Globale Trends 2003:309 ff , the chapter on wars and conflict resolution by Voker Böge and Tobias Debiel: the majority of wars are situations of internal violence, based on protracted economies of violence
(9) Confronting War: Critical Lessons from Peace Practitioners. Mary Anderson and Lara Olson with Kristin Doughty (2003). This project is based on twenty-six case studies on a wider variety of peace efforts, including programs of peace education and training, undertaken in a range of geographical settings, in different statges of conflict, at different levels of society, and with varying forms of connectedness to local, indigenous peace effotrs. A couple of German agencies, Reserach institutes and the BMZ participated actively in the project. The criteria identified were drawn from consultations with more than eighty peace practitioners - 'insiders' and 'outsiders'
(10) Anderson & Olson 2003:16 ff
(11) Anderson & Olson 2003:19
compare http://www.upeace.org/academic/masters/peace_education.htm , retrieved 29.1.2004
(13) compare also the UN study on disarmament and non-proliferation education, UNGA/57/124 Item 67 (c) of 30 August 2002 (Original English)
(14) UNESCO-ICE46th Session, Geneva, 5-8 September 2001, Conclusions and proposals for action, see http://www.ibe.unesco.org/International/ICE/46english/46conclue.htm
Christine M. Merkel, Direction for future action - Essentials of Peace Education - Feb 2004 - Feldafing